SALT LAKE CITY – Nearly three years before a gunman walked into a crowded supermarket in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with an AR-15 style weapon and killed 10 people, the city of Boulder, Colorado, voted to ban assault weapons.
Leaders had hoped to prevent the kind of mass shooting that’s struck the state more than once over the last two decades. But just 10 days before Monday’s rampage, the measure was blocked in court after a lawsuit backed by the National Rifle Association.
The ruling came under a Colorado law that bars local officials from making their own gun laws. Similar preemption laws have become the norm in over 40 U.S.